Throw Another Faggot on the Fire
Subtext and symbolism in 'Foundation' underscore Hollywood's fears about AI, Black men and "homonormative" gays.
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The following contains minor spoilers about Foundation, the Apple+ series.
THEATER OF THE RIDICULOUS
I was certain I would become an actor since age ten, at least. When I was transferred from St. Stephen’s in Rome, the city that raised me, to Trinity School in New York, the one that birthed me, I immediately enrolled in the theater program run by the legendary Bill Sweeney.
Bill cured me of that certainty by dunking me into just how seriously New Yorkers took the performing arts, and all arts in general, especially in the postwar years when the City became the cultural and financial “capital of the world.”
In Bill’s Advanced Theater program, there was no Bye Bye Birdie or normal prep-school Shakespeare. It was either something like Brecht-Weill’s original Mother Courage — with creepy atonal music and nihilistic words that eroded a piece of my soul every rehearsal and performance when I “sang” the sociopathic killer Eilif’s ‘The Fishwife and the Soldier,’ apparently with lyrics so obscure that Google can’t find them — or The Merchant of Venice set in the woman’s section at Auschwitz with the audience cast as camp guards watching it through chain-link fencing.
Bill lived for experimental theater. One day, while lying per usual on a black box in the school’s black box theater, chain-smoking and flicking the ash in one of the dozen or so cans of Coke that were his only daily nourishment as far as I ever saw, he introduced us to Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous via an anecdote about Ludlam’s Camille, a loose, gender-fluid interpretation of Dumas’ La Dame Aux Camélias:
“So Ludlam is playing Marguerite, in a wig and a dress with his big hairy chest exposed, lying on the chaise, dying of tuberculosis. He says to his maid in this weak, trembling voice, ‘Nanine, throw another faggot on the fire.’
“Nanine replies, ‘There are no more faggots in the house, madame.’”
Bill suddenly sat bolt upright, snapped his head toward us. “And Ludlam sits bolt upright, looks at the audience and bellows, ‘WHAT?! No more faggots in the house?!’”
The shock and outrageousness of the anecdote punched huge laughs out of us. Bill shot me a quick look: Unlike Ludlam’s mostly gay audience, I was the only out faggot in the house, not just in Advanced Theater but the entire school.
One night a few months before, I’d outed myself once and for all by colliding with a group of six drunk classmates while exiting The Works, a gay bar on Amsterdam, with film critic Rex Reed and a trio of other Armani leather-clad friends nearly twice my age. The following Monday I had a choice to either “work it,” as queens barked at drag balls, or perish. For this extrovert’s extrovert, there was never really a choice: I worked that shit into a superpower.
Leaping forward in spacetime to early this August in Los Angeles, I was elated by the introduction of an intergenerational same-sex marriage between two military men in the third episode of the second season of Foundation. I was grateful that it was seamlessly, naturally integrated into a big-budget premium series' world, not the main focus of a standalone rom-com like Billy Eichner’s Bros and the recently released Red, White and Royal Blue. There’s mild romance but no comedy in Foundation — the relationship is taken all the more seriously and emotionally as a result.
The reality is that Bel Roise (Ben Daniels) and Glawen Curr (Dino Fetscher) represent how utterly normal most same-sex life partners are, military couples in particular. I also appreciated the accurate, subtle infusion of the brothers-in-arms, Brokeback camaraderie in the relationship, which is integral to most homosexual long-term relationships. The mystery and frustrating allure of how the opposite sex thinks and acts in most straight couples is replaced by that tacit, comforting understanding.
The 24-year age difference between them isn't as common in real life as it is in porn, but it is for muscle-bear daddies like me or leaner gray wolves like Ben Daniel. I'm not sure I've ever seen it presented so matter-of-factly as to seem completely normal outside of a gay-themed film. Shame that it has to be in sci-fi, but if that’s what the future holds — by the look of humanity’s sociocultural trajectory it clearly does — I'm fine with it.
To someone with my experience, Bel and Glawen were refreshing and familiar all at once. I applauded the addition of a layer of authenticity in the casting of two out-gay actors in the roles. I pushed aside my veteran-dramatist’s dread that showrunner David Goyer would succumb to Hollywood tradition about homonormative gay men in dramas and “throw another faggot on the fire” by killing off either Bel or Glawen.
The introduction of their characters also smoothed over my mini-minor irritation that the arch-villain of the series, Emperor Cleon, referred to simply as “Empire,” is a lithe bitter queen — a White RuPaul out of drag — pretending to be a passionately straight man with a fetish for Teutonic female robots. Played by Lee Pace, a demi-masc gay man-slash-racehorse with a mellifluous classic airport announcer’s voice, Empire vogues through palaces and palatial spaceships in chiffon capes and palace pants like Linda Evangelista in a 90s Oscar de la Renta Couture show.
Let me reverse that bit of bitchery by admitting that Pace and Jared Harris’ performances are endlessly watchable. They keep the show from collapsing under the weight of poor character development, far-fetched subplots, and disastrous diversity-casting decisions.
As an Asimov superfan and fellow optimistic futurist who appreciates the realistic imaginativeness of his fiction as much as his more-accurate-than-everyone’s predictions about the future, I was hopeful that the show would mature and settle into the greatness he deserves in the second season after a turbulent start in the first. It certainly seemed it was headed that way after the third episode. Yes!
I belong to the tiny minority of futurists who don’t buy into Carl Sagan-ish “logic” about there being many alien civilizations out there — I believe we’re unique and, more likely than not, alone in the universe. Sure, there are plenty of life forms, but they’re likely not fully conscious, self-aware and intelligent enough to assume eventual mastery over Existence the way we are.
The supposition that because there are an estimated two trillion galaxies in the universe with the same ~4,000 solar systems as ours in the Milky Way there must be many alien species as intelligent as us or even more evolved is a logical fallacy that doesn’t factor in the context, as with most social beliefs. The uniquely perfect set of improbably random factors that have brought humankind to where we are is the proper way to calculate the probability of aliens. It’s highly unlikely we have any company out there.
Given that the universe is to be under our stewardship alone, I prefer my sci-fi to reflect that. Shows and movies like Foundation, Battlestar Galactica, and Dune do. I’ve never connected with the Star Wars and Star Trek visions of aliens as humans dressed in unbelievable, trick-or-treat latex costumes coming soon to a toy store near you.
Foundation in particular is a satisfying cornucopia of visual references to the sort of believably aspirational, grounded American sci-fi that I devoured as a kid, from its title sequence nodding to 70s and 80s Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke book covers to the production itself. I want to visit every place and planet envisioned by Goyer and his team on every spaceship, escape pod and 2001, A Space Odyssey vagina monolith they’ve designed.
In addition to relying on Pace and Harris’ broad acting shoulders, what kept Foundation from sinking with the first season was that the production was gorgeous and tasteful, its universe fearlessly eccentric, as chic and inventive as an Iris van Herpen 3D-printed gown. It also speaks to aspects of human nature and our sociocultural structures that are refreshingly original, as any decent adaptation of Asimov should.
By the season one finale, I was okay with most of the many transgressions Goyer took with the source material, namely the decision to diversity cast two main male characters from the books with Black women, in keeping with a trend that has become something of a delirious obsession in Hollywood and Democratic politics alike. (The day this para was written, California governor Newsom announced he would appoint a Black woman as a replacement for Sen. Diane Feinstein should she step down before her term is up, eliciting cries of “no thank you, we can manage on our own” tokenism from Black women politicians in the running.)
My elation about the show assuming the mantle greatness it deserves faded by the middle of the season. On the penultimate episode of the season two weeks ago, Goyer did indeed throw another faggot on the fire and killed off the younger gay spouse, Glawen, hewing closely to Hollywood’s unspoken tradition that homonormative gay men must always die in the end, or the middle, or preferably the denouement of the first act, if swingable. See Brokeback Mountain et al.
I’m not the first to complain about this. Bal and Glawen aren’t just faggots, they’re “cisgendered” White men, even more reason why they must perish in a planet-destroying conflagration, or so the professionally misandrist, masculine-brained Dykes on Bikes currently leading the Liberal parade by the nose have successfully convinced America we are.
Remember the “queer” backlash to Mayor Pete’s “assimilation” when he was running for president in 2020? Revolting, and not in the social-revolution sense.
Tangential note: The author of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx, is a lesbian. She has disavowed the movie stating, “I wish I’d never written the story.” Her reasoning is as flimsy as any critical theorist’s concoction, an attempt to masquerade her innate misandry: By focusing on the love between two average masculine men, director Ang Lee “missed the point,” which was homophobia. No, he didn’t — homophobia is everywhere, too.
It’s Proulx herself who misses her own point: She was writing what she knew, meaning they were intended to represent two masc-brained lesbians like her, but she was too afraid to be honest about it. She turned cowgirls into cowboys, but they were always drag kings in her mind. When she saw the reality of her cowardice presented so effectively and beautifully on screen, her shame combined with misandrist disgust shocked her into disavowing what she’d written. She likely doesn’t regret throwing the faggot on the fire in her story, but she resents the pathos and Oscars he elicited — he was always a she in Proulx’s mind.
The new series Star Wars: Ahsoka has no fewer than five masculinized women characters for no specific reason that I can see so far beyond a word the big White bear-daddy villain used in this week’s episode: “Witchcraft.” No doubt all will be explained later in the season when the purpose of so many warrior women is revealed, just as the hackneyed excuse for two Black women being cast in the place of male characters in the source material came to light in the finale of season one of Foundation.
That women have always had their own preferred genres that generally speaking haven’t included fantasy and sci-fi is irrelevant. Young girls need better role models, right, Barbie? They need to be shown that they can behave just like men and kick the patriarchy's ass across the galaxy; everything women already have to do and be in life just isn't good enough.
"Feminism is failing!" cry the Dykes on Bikes leading the cultural parade, few of whom, with the notable exception of Proulx, have children, or soul-crushing jobs in the corporate world. "Masculinize all girls to be like us! And no more oppressive pronouns!"
“Diversity casting” in both Hollywood and in Democratic politics only applies to Black women. In show after show since 2020, Black women have been given roles that were designated for Whites of either sex in the source material or by tradition, a phenomenon I’ll explore further ahead.
There’s nothing empowering, much less meritocratic, in tokenism; on the contrary, it diminishes and infantilizes a group that was never underrepresented or “unseen and unheard” in the first instance.
Season two of Foundation suffers from the same problem that bogged down season one: two insipid Black women in roles that were men in the source material. Also: why does diversity casting never include Black men? Had Goyer cast Black men, it would be understandable and not annoying in the least: I read the books so long ago that I don't remember if the characters' races were specified, just assumed, but I wouldn’t even notice if their race was different than what I assumed as a White man projecting himself onto the characters he was reading about provided their sex was the same, as clearly specified by those pesky pronouns.
Here’s what might have saved the casting of those specific Black actresses: Cast American Blacks, not sweet, assiduously polite British actresses like Lou Llobell (Gaal Dornick) and Leah Harvey (Salvor Hardin) with no edge, no righteous anger and determination, no believability as an intense genius mathematician and a fearless warrior respectively. Gimme Zoë Kravitz in The Batman, Halle Berry as Storm in X-Men, Zoë Saldaña in, well, everything she does. Now I’m with you, but still asking, “What is with this blinkered Liberal fetish for Black women?”
There is only one exception that I can think of since this whole dreary sham of diversity casting Black women as the only solution to the phantom “urgent and important” crisis of underrepresentation that kicked off in 2020 when a Black man was cast in a traditional White male role in a major production: Joel Coen's Macbeth meets Eraserhead, the first movie his brother, Ethan, didn't collaborate on.
I can just imagine why: Those are two seriously brilliant men and the concept was intellectually bankrupt — Macbeth was a historical figure, for starters. Then again, Ethan isn't the Coen brother married to the actor who played Lady Macbeth, a masc-presenting woman who has built her career around schmactivist roles.
Black men and non-fem-presenting, non-nonbinary, non-affectatious gays — both of whom clearly have a lot more sex than is seemly, plus huge dicks — are stumbling through spacetime side by side, the biggest threat to both straight White men and the masc-brained Dykes on Bikes behind critical theory, the hidden Dark Force behind a so-called social-justice movement that has caused more damage to Western culture than Liberals are willing to admit.
These are natural enemies who have bonded through an unintended, accidental alliance. I don’t know how they plan to make the disaster that critical social justice has been for liberalism in general and the Democratic Party in particular go away, certainly not with DEI digging in deeper and spreading like a virulent terminal-stage cancer. Maybe they’re planning on taking those many leaking barrels of toxic Woke waste out to the high desert at night and burying them secretly, hoping nobody notices, oblivious to the fact they’re on reality TV, their extensive rap sheets of destructive transgressions against society, children and Whites discussed on talk shows by conservatives and independent centrists alike.
Let me address the elephant in the essay that I’ve created so far: How can I be so contemptuous of diversity casting and representation in filmed content but still whine about how poorly represented my silent majority in the men-who-have-sex-with-men community is? For starters, Blacks were never underrepresented in the first instance, as I’ll soon explain with data, not opinions — enough of those, Annie.
And I’d like to see that we can live happily ever after like everyone else for a change, I dunno, like Mayor Pete and Chase and every other “homonormative” gay couple I know. Too much to ask, Hollywood?
SCHOOLING AN AI GONIF
No other writer has ever come close to examining the complex intellectual, practical and philosophical polemics of humankind’s inevitable relationship with robots with anything near the same profundity as Isaac Asimov.
With AI and the Singularity barreling down on us as we speak, we would do well to acknowledge that Hari Seldon, who accurately predicts the future via a discipline he invented called psychohistory, is Asimov’s alter ego. We might revisit his work with more scrutiny and far less liberty than David Goyer has taken in adapting Asimov’s work for the series. We should treat the Robot and Foundation texts as a flawed-but-insightful prototype for the Prime Radiant, the device that stores Hari Seldon’s calculations for the future.
Last week, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the other Silicon Valley Seldons of our age touched down with their private jets in Washington to discuss the future of AI with a Senate panel chaired by Uncle Chuck. (I call all Democratic senior statespeople either “uncle” or “aunt,” with great affection. My nickname for Nancy Pelosi, “Nana P.,” acknowledges her grandmotherly status in the Lib matriarchy.)
All of the Seldons agreed that the government should regulate the guardrails that surround the integration of AI into the world’s socio-systemic structures. I don’t know how they can improve on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which he introduced in 1942 in his short story Runaround:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The WGA strikes are partly due to justified fears that corporate Hollywood, production companies and producers will try to replace a large portion of the guild’s members with AI, drastically cutting the number of staff writers on a show.
In my view, the writers’ room part of the screenwriting world has always been bloated; too many word cooks with differing opinions trying to reach a consensus dilutes the quality of any creative endeavor. It’s largely responsible for why Hollywood is stuck in the dregs churning out such monotonous “visual Musak,” as it’s now called.
One of the reasons mainstream British TV is so superior to American is largely because they often have either one writer, or in the case of something like Doctor Who or Eastenders a pool of writers supervised by the story editor and creator, each of whom writes a block of half a dozen shows that cover a specific story arc.
Josh Fechter, a developer and self-styled “entrepreneur” of an AI writing program called Squibler, reached out to me via email after reading my recent essay about Hollywood likely being in a generational cyclical change to see if I might give him a platform via this newsletter to talk about how AI will be replacing my career, basically.
Let me give him the boost he asked for by reprinting most of what he wrote:
Squibler is the first company to enable you to use AI to write screenplays end-to-end. We think better AI = better screenplays. And so do the thousands of writers who use our tool every day.
I’d love to share with your audience about any of the topics:
Is the Future of Screenwriting, AI? This Entrepreneur Thinks So
This Entrepreneur Aims to Replace Screenwriters with AI
Does AI Writer Better Screenplays? This Entrepreneur Thinks So
This is my reply, expanded with portions of another email I wrote to AI developers of film and TV development programs I’m currently advising, who also approached me because of the essay:
Hi Josh:
Thanks for reading my article.
A few points:
If Grammarly can't get AI right as an assistant for creative writers of all kinds, I doubt your product is at the point where it would be a useful tool for people who make a living from writing, not just those who aspire to it.
Even when perfected, a tool is all it would be, not a replacement. I never stated in my article that it would be. There are a few reasons for this, the most important of which is that AI isn't sentient — it has no senses or emotions — attributes that creatives must have in abundance to be any good. It is unlikely to ever be sentient, even when it's conscious. See Data on Star Trek.
The reason sentience is important: How can you mimic and evoke human emotions if you can't feel them? I think the quality of screenwriting in Hollywood will need to improve dramatically once AI replaces the grind work, about which I know little. My focus is what I know: theatrical and premium TV development process.All humans are sentient, but creatives in particular also tend to be hypersensitive and empathic, which is why the vast majority of us are liberals, often to a radical degree. We experience physical, emotional and mental pain and joy more acutely.
Execs and producers — trained to be heartless bullies by heartless bullies — find it easy to abuse and manipulate writers in the development process when nobody else is around to see what's going on; by the time directors come aboard, most of the scripting process is already complete, there is at least a blinking green light — their input is mainly casting and other production decisions.
Executives and entrepreneurs are deluding themselves if they think they can do away with human creatives and make creative decisions on their own, but 90% of Hollywood producers and execs fancy themselves creative "storytellers" when they can barely hold an anecdote together at a dinner party. They're business people with opinions who — by virtue of their dominion over true creatives and the gradual complete corrosion of Hollywood culture since the rise of the blockbuster era in the 80s — suffer the mass delusion that they're in the same caste as us, in the same way they prestige borrow from celebrities to elevate their egos, a.k.a. starfucking.
The caste system is an important reference: As every Hindu knows, merchants and moneymakers, the Baniya, are distinct from writers, philosophers and artists, who are Brahmins. Unlike the dynamic in Hollywood, Brahmins are treated with respect bordering on reverence.Because of this delusion, the money people might try to replace us and other departments in the filmmaking process with AI, but they’re doomed to fail. Only creatives should be making decisions about creative products.
Their actions are ipso facto proof of my point: The fact they are so sure they can make creative decisions without us shows they don't have the sort of creative minds to make those calls. Again, creativity is an innate quality, not something that can be learned, only perfected with experience. Most of us don't know how we make decisions; it truly is a sixth sense.
AI has no real sense of anything because it doesn’t have senses or emotions. If you watch the Foundation, the robot Demerzel has emotions but she can’t be sure if they’re hers or if she was programmed to have them, namely love, compassion, loss-and-longing, and the attendant sorrow from those feelings.
She doesn’t experience pain, however, as we know from the scene at the beginning of season two when her head is sliced in half by a ninja; she doesn’t flinch and carries on fighting. This means she doesn’t experience fear, either, one of what I would consider to be primary emotions felt by most animals that acts as a survival mechanism, which in turn protects the Selfish Gene we carry within us from being wiped out.
In my view a primary emotion carries a cluster of related secondary emotions with it; for instance, horror and blockbuster filmmakers must know how to manipulate fear’s secondaries to elicit them as responses. A machine simply wouldn’t know how to do that.What I'm advocating is to reinforce executive decision-making with AI as an enhancement to the development process. Execs mistrust creatives as much as they depend on us, which is really a projection of how untrustworthy and fearful of creativity they are.
Hollywood is full of talented people who have been forced to retire early because they displeased uncreative hustlers in great suits by disagreeing with them and standing their ground. Creatives are terrified and yearn for change but we've been trapped in it so long that we've developed Stockholm Syndrome, accepting the status quo as normal. It's been more difficult for me to shake than I thought when I began writing about the intrinsic flaws of the modern Hollywood system.
I believe it's going to be very attractive to members of the Writers Guild and the global filmmaking community as a whole if there are AI guardrails in place to prevent us from being penalized, replaced or fired if we push back in the development process. If there are reasonably “objective” data points that both creatives and business-minded people can point to for consensus, it will help execs cover their asses — “Yeah, but CutToo AI gave it an A+” — and creatives can feel that the projects they slaved over for years, often for free, didn’t die because of poor human judgment loaded with bias, personal taste, agendas, cronyism, animus and low creative intelligence.If Hollywood is currently churning out "visual Muzak" it’s largely because business people have been making creative decisions based on mitigating risk and covering their asses for so long that it's become institutionalized in the filmmaking process, even on the indie side; for instance, you can’t get a film financed without two recognizable faces attached because foreign sales agents won’t be able to sell it to the various global territories without them.
It goes on from there. As a British executive producer on one of my as-yet-un-produced projects, which had three names attached, “Every film financing deal that closes is nothing short of a miracle.” It shouldn’t be that way. It’s entirely because the business side doesn’t trust the creative to make what they think are business decisions. All they’re doing is limiting and weakening the strength of the director-writer-talent pool. The truth is those data points don’t mitigate risk or improve the product. I believe AI can help with that.
Development is a mystery even to others further along in the filmmaking process who only come aboard once financing is secured; the traditional guesstimate rule of thumb is that 10% of projects that have money decked toward them in development go into production. The most original and engaging projects need to be greenlighted, not just the safest, the ones stars want to make, the passion projects of execs, or only those proposed by above-the-line creatives whom execs don’t consider "difficult," meaning complacent, agreeable pleasers, never a good look on a truly talented person.
It’s completely understandable that with so much money and their careers at stake execs and producers need handholding to mitigate their jitters. I’m convinced that with the right guidance and input from veterans on both the business and creative sides a standardized AI development and assessment tool, constantly self-correcting and evolving, can be created and implemented. To ensure even more transparency and objectivity there should be three discrete programs pulling information from the same sources as with the the credit bureaus. All three programs would be approved by the Writers, Directors and Producers Guilds and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in partnership with the studios, networks and major agencies.
I'd wish you good luck with your AI writers-replacement endeavors were you not working so hard to take away my career. Again, you are ipso facto proof of my point: just the fact you believe that we can be replaced by AI shows that you understand little about creativity in general and screenwriting/filmmaking in particular.
Very sincerely,
James
One aspect that shouldn’t be factored into the AI assessment tools as a measurement of the quality of a project is ideology. DEI and social justice themes have proven disastrous for mainstream movies and shows, especially those based on source material that never intended to serve as vehicles for the troublesome, nefarious offspring of Marxist-Feminist dialectic.
THE BLACK MATRIARCHY: HOLLYWOOD’S MAGIC BULLET
At some point in 1980, around the time Bill Sweeney told Charles Ludlam’s “throw another faggot…” anecdote, I had my first experience of Harlem. I would have more when my tenth-grade best friend from St. Stephens School in Rome, Vanessa, moved back to New York a few years later. But at that point in the City’s history, it was inconceivable that a White Euro-preppy kid — or any White person— would go to Harlem unaccompanied by Black people unless he was suicidal.
It should be noted that there was nowhere in New York that Black people couldn’t go. They might not have been allowed to buy in the sort of stodgy, people-like-us co-ops that my family lived in, but nor were Whites like Donald Trump, which is believed to have been a major factor in his motivation to build Trump Tower as a massive middle finger to my natal world up Fifth Avenue. As Maureen Dowd (I believe) and other New York chroniclers observed during the 2016 campaign, it is that insurmountable rejection — a life sentence imposed because of his birth, Queens accent and nouveau-riche tackiness — that pushed Don Pugsley to become who he is today.
Nostra culpa, nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa.
Let’s put another historical inaccuracy of the modern antiracism movement to rest: Anybody could live on the Upper East Side if they could afford it. Per the theme song of The Jeffersons, “Moving on up, to the East Side,” condos were a perfectly good option; in fact, if you can move past the mindfuck of snobbery and other social insecurities, they’re preferable and more practical. If I had enough money to buy a place in the neighborhood I was born in, and the inclination to live in that area, I would buy a townhouse, never the sort of “beastly, bourgeois, babbity” co-op I was born and raised in, to paraphrase Auntie Mame.
When I try to describe what New York was like in the 70s and 80s, I use Joker with Joaquin Phoenix as a reference: “It’s the only movie that shows what it was like back then.”
It was the most dangerous city in the world and that was just part of what made it thrilling. It was an enormous, cavernous, grimy, garbage-strewn, cacophonous, dilapidated amusement park-slash-glorified slum crackling with creativity and wit in every atom of its being.
My first experience of Harlem happened one late afternoon while I was my way home from my weekend job as a salesman at Gucci in Midtown. I was sixteen, still in the process of becoming my birthright as a native New Yorker. The most harrowing part was getting used to the subway; compared to London’s Underground, New York’s system was the Underworld, every journey a descent into Hades. It’s more a purgatory now, after the Giuliani-Bloomberg-led renaissance.
I decided that day to graduate a notch in my incipient New Yorker-ness and try the 4 Express, the really fast squealing rollercoaster train that seemed it might jump the rails at any moment, rather than my usual, the lurching, stop-and-start 6 Local.
As Vanessa’s mother, Deloise, had noted a few months earlier, sitting on her Nigerian throne in the living room in an African-print kaftan, toking on a joint clasped between blue fingernails that we were sharing during my school lunch break — I was still too fresh from Italy to eat that American prison-food muck and Deloise lived two blocks away from Trinity: “James, you are a dizzy child.”
I’ve always had a rich inner life, built as a refuge from my father’s relentless persecutions since before I can remember. When I was a teen, I’d get so up in my head when I was stoned — meaning every day after morning recess — that I’d freeze until the first wave of intensity wore off and the flocks of screaming paranoia bats had fled the caves of my mind.
I had one of those dizzy-child moments that memorable day: I missed the 86th Street and Lexington stop. Back then it was common for a Black person in the car to yell, “All White people off the train!” when the doors opened. That day, nobody warned me that I’d reached the frontier of where I was allowed to be on the island on which I was born.
I got off at the next stop, 125th and Lex, the heart of East Harlem. As Wikipedia notes, “The station is unusual in design, as a bi-level station with island platforms.” As I oriented myself on the platform, I wasn’t yet aware of another unusual feature: no inside crossway to get to the platform for the southbound train. I had to exit the station, cross Lex, and pay again at the Downtown entry, which didn’t matter because I had a bus pass from school that allowed me to travel anywhere on MTA transport for free.
An elderly church mama was at my side the moment the subway doors closed. “Child, you are in the wrong place. Where are you going?” After I gave her my address, she turned and with absolute authority that was not to be questioned, exactly how Deloise bossed me around, my guardian nana said, “Follow me.”
Coming out of the stairs to the street confirmed my her admonition about being in the wrong place: It was as crowded, bustling, grimy and Joker-strewn with litter and graffiti as any place in the City, except I was the only White person as far as the eye could see. She guided me across the street without looking back to make sure I was following her and stayed with me until I’d passed through the Downtown turnstile and was on the platform.
After I told Dr. Borkheim that story in June of 2020, while processing the BLM-incited unrest that shuttered my neighborhood for two weeks, he said, “In Black culture, mothers and old women are all-powerful and deeply respected.”
There was so much wrong with the BLM narrative that was immediately apparent to me but not to most other Liberals, probably because I’m a New Yorker of a certain age. For a start, George Floyd’s horrific murder wasn’t racially motivated, or Derek Chauvin would’ve been tried and convicted for a hate crime, too. By the time Minneapolis Police Chief Arradondo, a Black man, held a press conference to say that photos of Derek Chauvin at White Supremacy rallies were fake Photoshopped images, it no longer mattered: Most of America believed that Floyd’s murder had been racially murdered.
They also believed that Black men were being slaughtered by police in the thousands. The reality is that less than 250 Blacks had been murdered the year before, in 2019, or .001% of Black men, 1 in 230,000. In other words, five times less likely than dying from a hornet sting. It’s a vanishingly rare event.
Even if those statistics represent a higher representation of Blacks versus Whites killed by police, if the number of violent crimes committed by race is thrown into the equation — presumably what would most likely put you in the middle of aggressive or deadly police action — Black men are actually underrepresented by 50%. The biggest threat to Black men then, as now, is other Black men.
In this era, she who controls the narrative — whether it’s pure fiction, partly true or factual — controls the conversation. The fact is, there isn’t a single item on the social justice movement’s list of grievances, constructs and new-fangled tropes that is justified, most notably the arch-canard of specious constructs, “patriarchy.”
In the weeks after that therapy session, I began to perceive Black America as essentially a matriarchal subculture, for reasons that I’ll leave to others to explain reductively in ways that will no doubt lay the blame entirely on White racism, and not acknowledge more fascinating details like how Ghanaian Ashanti culture was matriarchal. The Ashanti Empire was a trade-oriented, slave-owning culture that supplied a considerable portion of slaves to the Americas.
I was partly raised by Ashanti men. The 70s in Italy were so violent and turbulent that they were dubbed “the year of lead” for the insane amount of bullets and bombs. High-value individuals were kidnapped regularly, including kids at my school, most notably Paul Getty III, whose ear was severed and sent to a newspaper. We were a high-profile family; because we lived behind the American ambassador’s residence, local gossip had it that I was the ambassador’s son.
All of which is to explain that our Ashanti housemen were as much bodyguards as live-in staff; the cleaning, washing and ironing were taken care of by an Italian housekeeper. I spent most evenings in their quarters listening to The Voice of America on the radio. They taught me a great deal about Ashanti culture and a smattering of the language. Most importantly for me in terms of my lifelong reaction to Black men in general, as long as they were in the house, I was safe from my father’s abuse. That created an unbreakable trust and affection by association.
During and after the 2020 riots — again, I grew up in Italy in the 70s, and I’m a writer; I know the correct word for what I witnessed and they weren’t “peaceful protests” — I read interviews with the three women who founded BLM, at least two of whom are lesbians, about how they were “trained Marxists,” and how the movement had begun to feel like a “religious experience.”
I then began to see the bigger picture of the entire Marxist-Feminist matriarchy headed by a masculine-brained lesbian, Judith! Butler, the inventor of modern American critical theory, who in 1999 won first place in the annual Bad Writing Awards handed out by the academic journal Philosophy and Literature.
Nobody in academia believed that Butler’s contrived, baseless nonsense — much less her distortions of Simone De Beauvoir’s mistranslated writings to justify her extended Marxist-Feminist coven’s pathological misandry and lend it that French Existentialist je ne sais quoi — would lead Western civilization to where we are today. In a nod to the LGBT sub-group that traditionally leads Pride parades in major cities, I dubbed them “The Dykes on Bikes leading the cultural parade.”
After 2020, Hollywood was seized by the maws of all three heads of what I call Woke Cerberus: modern antiracism, MeToo feminism, and gender-queer activism. The fraught claim that Blacks were underrepresented in filmed content, which began after publicist April Reign stumbled on the hashtag OscarsSoWhite in the 2015 race — an ignorant misinterpretation of how the Oscars work, and about how awards films are financed, which was akin to retirees in Florida tearing the nursing home down because there were no even numbers called in a round of Bingo — gained even more traction.
The real truth is that Blacks have been overrepresented for decades, particularly in television. Per UCLA’s 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report, “Blacks were over-represented among actors in broadcast scripted shows in 2015-16, claiming 17 percent of the roles.”
I’ve already mentioned how indie films are financed: recognized names must occupy at least two of the lead roles. Awards films are put together the same way. Few women, minorities and Blacks can “open” films, and their pay used to be scaled accordingly — it was never misogyny, Geena, purely business and you know it.
One of the few Blacks who could open a perpetually money-losing big-screen drama was Will Smith, who gave it his best shot in 2014 with Concussion, a flagrant piece of awards-baiting pap that was clearly meant to get him the Oscar he always wanted. When he was overlooked for the 2015 awards his reaction was… well, I’ll let “the slap heard around the world” when he finally was given an Oscar speak for itself.
In other words, it’s a question of how best to mitigate the riskiest genre of all, drama, and hopefully break even on the tens of millions spent to make an awards film. Few actually make a profit. If Hollywood execs thought they could make money casting people who can’t open a film, they would do it. But it’s the public who decides who’s popular and bankable, not the studios and networks.
Again, perhaps the sort of AI programs I’m proposing will give executives more confidence in greenlighting projects in which the material is the star, not the performers, thereby widening the casting pool to almost every working actor. Given how small the bankable star list is, that would be like rain after a forty-year drought in Hollywood, to the corporate and creative sides alike.
Rather than greenlight original material written for Blacks about the Black experience, Hollywood’s lazy magic bullet to resolve a manufactured crisis based on flagrant disinformation has been to “diversity cast” Black women as characters that were White in the source material on filmed adaptations that were mostly already greenlighted before BLM finally broke the remaining chains on Woke Cerberus and it consumed America, followed by all of Western society — when America is bitten, the whole world gets rabies.
The final season of Foundation aired last Friday, a week after I began this essay. More than ever, it’s a show that represents the vision I share with Asimov about the future of mankind’s relationship with AI, as well as the greatest example of how DEI run amok only makes Hollywood’s visual Muzak all the more intolerable, like we’re stuck in an Existentialist elevator forever listening to the same instrumental cover of a Carpenter’s song on repeat.
In terms of casting and other drastic changes to the characters and plot that pander to the baseless demands of the social justice movement, there are other elements in Goyer’s Foundation beyond just two Black women cast in lead roles written for men in the source material:
The Spacers are a transhuman cyborg race conceived by Asimov as a hybrid elite that’s disdainful of OG homo sapiens, a scenario that will likely come to pass — I’ve already been embedded with a piece of tech to replace my left hip, and am going in for the second in November.
Goyer gorgeously transposed the Spacers in the first season by blending them with Dune’s guild navigators, mutants who use the spice to bend spacetime and transport spaceships across that empire. Spacers are both pilots and sexy flight attendants — ethereal, floating women with glowing eyes and circuitry elegantly accentuating their faces — who are integral to making jump drives work.
In season two it’s revealed that they’re all Black women, ten percent of whom are enslaved by Empire/Cleon, who controls the mined substance called “opalesk” — read Dune’s spice — that they need to survive and do their jobs.It’s clear now that the “genetic dynasty” of Cleon emperors is a reference to Nazi eugenics. The operation is controlled by Demerzel, a Teutonic blond sociopathic robot with a heavy German accent who doesn’t exist in the books. She’s played by Finnish actress Laura Birn, the only White woman in the main cast.
Until the final episodes of the second season, I never understood why, with all of the White actresses in Britain and America, Goyer chose to cast a German-adjacent actress. Lest you think I’m seeing things that aren’t there: “Demerzel” is probably an anagram derived from a mashup of Nazi eugenicist Dr. Mengele and Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who is considered the father of genetics.
I might only be a quarter Russian Ashkenazi raised purely goyim and therefore not a “real Jew,” but we all share the histories. Let me say this: Enough already with the stereotyping of Germans as Nazis. Philosophically speaking, it’s no different than how they stereotyped us.A new character not in the books is Cleon’s fiancée, Queen Sareth, played by Ella-Rae Smith, a mixed-race model-actress the Black community would consider Black, although she hasn’t expressed her race/ethnic identity publicly. She is being forced into an arranged marriage with Cleon, which she agrees to in order to find out whether Empire wiped out her entire family. It turns out to have been the eugenicist robot Demerzel.
Another new character not in the source material, the androgynous novice monk Brother Constant — played by Isabella Laughland, who is half White, half Indo-Guyanese — is presumably nonbinary. Her sidekick is Poly, another obvious nod to gender-queerism and polyamory, played by Punjabi British actor Kulvinder Ghir, the most sniveling, enfeebled Sikh I’ve ever seen, almost shamefully so — Sikhs are proud warriors, a fiercely martial culture.
I can hear the Ava DuVernay-inflected Hollywood elite — the same people who shuttered the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a foreign charity, and forced them to sell the Golden Globes because it didn’t matter that most other countries don’t share America’s racial demographics and therefore don’t have any entertainment journalists of Sub-Saharan descent with enough personal wealth and motivation to move to Los Angeles to cover the glorious film industry — hate laughing and shrugging off my concerns about Foundation’s excessive pandering to the demands of social justice activists: “Hahaha! Oh, come on, James, you dizzy child. It’s just a TV show!”
If it’s so trivial, why agitate for DEI in the first place, considering that none of it, not a wasted brain cell of philosophical thought nor a nonsensical neologism uttered at a critical theory conference at Princeton, has any merit? What is the point of reinforcing these racist tropes about racism being baked into White DNA, and sexist stereotypes about men and the imaginary patriarchy, via the most influential cultural vehicle of all?
Oprah, let me speak my truth about the masculine-brained Dykes on Bikes matriarchy, the hidden masterminds whose nefarious agenda Liberals are falling over themselves to execute. I promise I won’t tear up in indignation over the all-too-real racist and sexist injustices of it all.
Let me being by saying that at least half of my friends are women, always have been, much to the constant despair of, and opprobrium from, my parents. I’ve never been able to see gender differences: If a kid was smart and interesting, and felt the same about me, I became friends with her/him.
If I must break it down, I’d say I rely on my men friends for companionship and camaraderie, and on my women friends for emotional support, like most gays as well as straight men in long-term relationships with women — we’re not all that different in that respect. It’s just that gays have many women as emotional companions and straight men have one at a time, unless they’re French or Italian and have a separate close friendship with a longtime mistress.
The same balance applies to my professional relationships: my first paid creative gig was at 18 assisting fashion photographer Pamela Hanson. I then edited a women’s magazine with my closest friend from Rome, Saskia van der Lingen. The first feature script of mine to be produced and released was directed by Pamela Rooks. I won’t go into the number of women producers I’ve worked with.
My current creative partner, Rain Li, is a Beijinger who left China for England when she was 15 and worked her way up through the electrical crew on film sets, a department that isn’t just male-dominated, they tend to be burly brutes one allele cluster away from gorillas. She makes four times what I do, at least.
“I’ve never been discriminated against either as a woman or as a Chinese,” Rain said to me the other day when we were discussing Foundation and the absurdity of Hollywood’s overcompensation by throwing a Black woman at everything and hoping she sticks. She loved the books, but can’t get past the third episode of season one no matter how much I’ve enjoined her to stick it out. Turns out she was right all along: Foundation was almost good, but after the absurdity of the season finale last week, which only Vulture has called out as being ludicrous, I’m done.
My truth is, Oprah, that Dave Chappelle got it wrong in his “alphabet people” car analogy, which broke down the dynamics of the LGBT community: gay men aren’t in the driver’s seat; masc-brained lesbians are.
‘LGBT’ begins with L, not G. Dykes on Bikes lead the parade. I positive that every fem-brained true lesbian I’ve ever known is nodding in agreement with me. In fact, so are the bull dykes — they are not without that biting wit that people of all oppressed communities adopt to get by without losing their minds.
No matter what web of deceit Judith! and her many covens across academia have spun, LGBs are about sex and sexuality. All dynamics in our world boil down to that, nothing else; anyone who tells you differently isn’t getting laid and is just going to glitter-bomb you with specious neologisms and hackneyed tropes.
Masc-brained lesbians have always been difficult for gay men to handle, especially when we were dying in droves but still fighting for equal rights. Women were largely unaffected. It takes an embodiment of the word “patriarchal” like me ages to get them to trust me enough to relax their guard.
During the “gay plague,” bull dykes carried on as usual, seducing straight women, luring them out of marriages to men that had run their course by using gangbusters’ cunnilingus that triggered orgasms of a kind that few straight men have the time, desire or firsthand physical knowledge to achieve in their partners, just as men give better head to other men than most women do.
The problem is those disaffected women aren’t true lesbians; they’re temporarily deluded, knocked gaga by world-class pussy eating. In my experience, they invariably wake up one day a month or even years later and crave dick again. Having convinced themselves this was the one that wasn’t like the dozens of others, masc-brained lesbians pack up the U-Haul, get on their Harleys and hunt for the next one, cursing men all the way.
If Pepé Le Pew, that early martyr to Wokeism, represents anything other than the delusions of limerence, it’s bull dykes. They’re convinced that their ideal woman is a skunk like they are, but she’s a cat, plain and simple. They can invent all the genders and sexualities they want, there might indeed be many to skin them, but in the end a cat is just a cat. It’s called human nature and it’s observable throughout mankind.
The fact that those ideal women go back to men, or that they can’t be seduced in the first place, drives masc-brained lesbians over the edge of sanity and reality with bitterness and resentment toward biological men. If they’re lso possessed by an unmelting American “stoic and a killer” soul, as D.H. Lawrence correctly called it, we end up with the sort of intricate web of lies constructs and contrived bullshit intersectionalities that we’re caught in today.
Those perpetually rejected masc-brained lesbians imagine a world without dicks for those seduced straight women to go back to. You would think that after so many of these cycles of seduction, commitment and rejection, they should know better than to expect a life-long relationship with a straight woman. In my experience, they never learn: Artemis’ hunt for the perfect straight lass is eternal.
Just as fem-presenting gay men resent rarely getting laid — the cult of masculinity reigns over the gay world just as the feminine dominates true lesbians — the inevitable, eventual rejection by the object of the masc-brained lesbian’s desire produces constant cycles of narcissistic injury and rage.
Welcome to the true motivations behind Wokeism: It’s all about who owns that vagina and penis, baby, nothing else. Oprah, trust me when I say that the politics of pussy and dick are at the foundation of all of it, from DEI being imposed in corporations and government systems, to faux-liberalist, go-Woke-go-broke Hollywood’s absurd diversity castings, to MeToo expulsions, to demonizing racist and sexist representations of White men, to the erasure of Black men, to the excessive masculinizing of women’s roles. It’s all in the name of “feminism.”
Before the season finale of Foundation, I was puzzled as to why Goyer would resort to the Thrown Another Faggot on the Fire trope; Hollywood has been under the LGBT-image yoke of GLAAD and HRC for a while now, and that’s been a complaint for a long time, as I noted in the first part of this essay.
After watching the season finale, it turns out the joke was on me: In the Foundation universe, nobody really dies. In a closing montage that is a direct homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Glawen walks up the ramp into Hari Seldon’s quantum-whatsit, spaceship-slash-vagina-monolith with thousands of others scooped up from Planet Terminus as it was being destroyed by Cleon the Nazi.
Seeing as Bel Roise also perishes with a central character whom we’ve already been told is a key in the future of humanity, as predicted by the Prime Radiant, we can be fairly sure that the faggots might have been thrown on the fire, only to be scooped up again by the sort of crappy, blockbuster era well-made crap that Goyer has always made, but as an Asimov superfan I tried to see differently.
According to Goyer’s Foundation, 50,000 years in the future humanity is still struggling with the same putative social justice issues that are plaguing us in the present, except those issues don’t really exist anymore, only in residual amounts. In the case of gender-queerism, they’ve never existed at all.
The French have two expressions that I prefer to their English equivalents for describing something more precisely. The first is the word for ‘hangover,’ gueule de bois, meaning “mouth/face of wood.” The other is for ‘illogically far-fetched,’ tiré par les cheveux, meaning “pulled by the hair.”
Any adaptation of Asimov should be like watching a riveting game of speed chess in Washington Square Park. Foundation could’ve been an achingly glamorous Battlestar Galactica with sleeker special effects.
Between the excessive sycophantic pandering to the nefarious, penis-hating agendas of Dykes on Bikes hiding behind dumb-dumb “trained Marxists” — I’m almost at a loss as to how to describe just how infantilizing and diminishing it is — and the pulled-by-the-hair device of quantum-whatsit immortality that turns every character into a Whac-a-Mole who can’t really die, thereby utterly obliterating the stakes and weakening the drama, I have to say that Goyer playing on my assumptions with the Faggot on the Fire trope doesn’t make my point about Hollywood’s treatment of masculine gay men and couples any less valid. On the contrary, he’s made us look even more ridiculous and cloying.
Here’s the real rub, Oprah: Corporate Hollywood is perfectly aware it’s all bullshit; they’re by far the smartest guys in the room, just not very creative. They’re overly cautious starfuckers who are entirely reliant on data points to inform their decisions; that’s why I’m hoping AI can be put to better use than the further enrichment of the corporate side at the expense of writers by doing away with us.
Oprah, you know as well as anyone that they’re just yessing and playing social justice activists for the publicity and pats on the back from the Liberal press, just as you are. They’re not really liberals themselves; they just play them on TV and vote that way, maybe. And you know that my harsh language isn’t merely for shock value; it’s a representation of any given phone call with a producer or agent during a negotiation.
Still skeptical? Well, the strike talks resume today. Gov. Newsom is stepping in. I’m sure they’ll be resolved soon. But if Hollywood execs were liberals in real life, the guilds wouldn’t have had to strike in the first instance.
Thanks for reading.
MILDLY INTERESTING
It struck me while I was satisfying my inner Felix Unger — not that inner, really, more like an out-and-proud Felix Unger on Adderall — by wasting a few hours tweaking the key art for Foundation season two in Photoshop to be just right for the feature image for this essay that it looks like the sort of images I’ve created for some of my posts, namely ‘Orthodox Atheism’ and ‘Talking the Selfish Out of Selfhood.’ I’m not claiming appropriation; it’s more that I’ve been in film for so long that I tend to approach visual hooks for written content as if they’re key art for movies and TV.
IRIS VAN HERPEN’S WORK
FURTHER READING
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Gawd, I do appreciate you - politics-wise, gayness-wise, and theatre-wise. An anecdote, just cuz: When I was 16, in 1979, I went to New York with my same-age cousin - innocent Canadian kids staying in Brooklyn with his grandmother, which was like a real-life Woody Allen movie (even more so than my dad's family in Montreal). I was already obsessed with experimental theatre by then, and he loved more conventional fare, so he agreed to come with me to Soho to see the Wooster Group ("Point Judith", with Willem Dafoe) and I went to Broadway shows with him. We saw Chorus Line (don't remember it at all) and Bowie in Elephant Man (I recall his initial appearance and how he bent himself into the contorted position he'd hold for the rest of the performance - he was great). When we headed to Wooster Street, we got the wrong directions and ended up in some area that was deserted but looked like it usually catered to longshoremen. A cop directed us back the other way, saying we probably didn't want to be hanging around this neighbourhood, so we retraced our steps and found the show, which was a wonderful and entirely inexplicable experience. Oh, and another time we took an express subway by mistake, noticing that there were less and less white folks on the train ... until we were in Harlem and realized there were none. We hopped on the next one back - all good. Thanks and best....